My Animal Life (23 page)

It's hard to recreate all the reasons for the crash. If I had a tragic flaw, it was arrogance, which sounds like ignorance, and came from it. I simply thought I could do what I wanted. If you don't come from a literary background, perhaps it takes you longer to learn the rules? And I had stayed curiously isolated. Even though I had been one of the ‘Best of Young British', even though I had been a Booker judge, I had mostly stayed at home with Nick and Rosa, writing books and getting on with my life.
I thought that the writing was all you had to do
. It seems extraordinary, looking back at it now, but I'd probably been to less than a dozen literary parties, all told. I didn't see that they were important. I see it now; you get out there and smile, and meet people, and are seen on the circuit, which means you are recognised as ‘one of us'. Moreover, you learn lessons from the group. I should have attended to a stray remark Jonathan Warner made when he paid so well for me: ‘I love your work, but I was surprised, when I asked around the office, some people hadn't heard of you.' I wasn't on the circuit. I remained naïve, and my thought processes don't bear examination.

Perhaps, now Jonathan was dead, I should move from HarperCollins, even though I was in the middle of a two-book contract? I had no personal links there any more, and I'd heard of people doing just that.
We would get a big advance, and pay them off (yet advances, all round, were too big, in the '80s. I saw the crest building, I didn't see the crash.) I had moved before, I could move again (but you can't keep moving on for ever. Too many moves give you a bad reputation.) Yes, I felt my age meant I had to climb, but I hadn't considered it was also a drawback. I thought I was still seen as a young contender. At forty-six, it was a dangerous assumption.

I approached the tallest, and said to be the toughest, agent with a literary reputation. His name had lustre because of his clients, yet the offices were small and uncomfortable and hard to get to, and I never felt at ease. Personally we were ill-assorted; he was too tall, too aristocratic, too dry, too shy, with an amused, conspiratorial manner that meant nothing; he had been very good at making money, and very good at picking clients. Yet he was also known for his love of good writing. From the little we talked, I think this was true; he loved Nabokov, as did I, and I was desperate to believe in him. I sent him my book to see if he liked it, and he said he thought it ‘remarkable'. He read it on some Greek island and left a praising message on my answerphone. What a fool I was; I kept the tape for weeks.

I went to see the first, and much more simpatico, agent who thought he had inherited me. He sat in his office with my book on his lap, and I saw he did like it, and was slightly hurt when I told him I was probably going to leave, though he had a wealth of clients, and of course soon got over it (why was I so stupid? I liked this first man, instinctively trusted him, could talk to him, yet I opted for the austere unknown because I thought he could magically lift me into the
literary stratosphere, with his other clients. I thought I was making the right decision, yet lunch with this second man was empty and uncomfortable, and part of me wondered if his reputation came partly from his height, and his upper-class drawl, for literary agents are not usually so lofty. I should have listened to my animal instincts rather than the vaulting ambition of my brain.)

Thus bolstered by the good opinions of two agents who had to praise me to represent me—which does not mean they were insincere, but an agent's job is to hook new names—and my husband's enthusiasm (he read the book with the doors open on our green garden, as spring came on; he loved me, he loved it, but warm April possibly hazed his senses)—I dispatched the book to HarperCollins. I was mostly buoyant. Now everything would change.

Yet part of me was anxious. Such a very long novel. It was partly to do with the look of the manuscript. It's part of the ‘frame' that, according to psychologists, conditions the greater part of people's response; what they know, or think they know, before they start reading.
The Keeper of the Gate
was the first book I had written straight on to computer
(Where are the Snows
and
Lost Children
were both drafted longhand). I used a huge font (why?), 14 pt, too many spaces, too many ellipses. In manuscript this novel ran to nearly 500 pages. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to say to the publishing world, ‘This is big, this is a substantial book.' Probably it just looked long and shapeless.

My relationship with the new editor at HarperCollins Flamingo was non-existent, so the ground my work fell
on was unprepared
(always get on with your editor
. Sometimes you really do need advice.) He had suggested we meet for a drink at intervals to discuss progress. But I never discussed my works-in-progress. Besides, at first there
was
no progress: not until the first four months of 1994 did the novel suddenly burst free of chaos. And this book was, to say the least of it, unusual. Not the manuscript to send to the new editor who, it's cruel to say, but true, was best known for having commissioned a novel inspired by a TV coffee advert.

Why was my sixth novel unusual? Because it was about race. The germ of it was a racial killing. In April 1993, the black student Stephen Lawrence had been murdered at a bus-stop in south-east London by racist white youths. It was a horrible case, one of the sudden outbreaks of savagery that tells us London isn't just a great city of endlessly mixing genes and peoples. We were not post-racist, then or now; we merely legislate against it, and rub along together, and marry each other, and hope for the best, which mostly happens—but every so often, so does the worst.

My personal experience of the crime sounds trivial. Rosa's school was in Brent, which had, at the time, the highest proportion of black people in the UK. Naturally Rosa had black friends, naturally I was friends with their mothers, Rochelle's mother Sandra, Shakira's mother, a friendship built on shared love of our children. But British black people felt burning indignation over this murder. One of their best, a good student, a boy who should have become a lawyer, had been senselessly killed by white racists. The veil was lifted; their worst fears were true. For a while, all white people stood
accused. And I found that my black friends, who I liked and valued, for a while were unable to meet my eyes. A veil had come down, though it didn't last.

But I still felt accountable. What had I actually done to dissociate myself from the murderers? In 1982, when American Cruise missiles were about to be sent to Britain, I had written my anti-war novel
The Burning Book
; in 1988, the murder of eighty-four-year-old antinuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell had inspired my fourth novel,
Grace
. What was I going to do this time?

I wanted to protest; as Dickens did against the evils of his day, and Thackeray, and George Eliot—so many great nineteenth-century novelists. It didn't make them less literary. Many of my literary models are modernist—Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov—but for me the modernist aesthetic breaks down when it isolates the writer from the world. Like the modernists, I love pattern, and try to give each book an overall controlling form, but I also have one eye on reality. I want my books to express the whole of me, politics and jokes as well as love of beauty.

What kind of country, what kind of family, might produce racists like the five white thugs? This was what I needed to write about. What did it say about my city? For I had become a Londoner, and Stephen Lawrence was one of our own. But so were the thugs, the murderers.

In Kensal Rise, the subject was everywhere. I heard the things said by the white workmen who came to the flat; they weren't middle-class, and hadn't learned to hide it. They seemed to particularly hate Indians, who they were afraid were after their jobs, but they didn't like Africans and Caribbeans either. The reasons were many: ‘they don't pay'; ‘you can't trust them'. Yet for
the first time in my life I was living in a world where there were equal numbers of black and white, which in many ways stifled prejudice, for it was simply too tiring to keep noticing colour; there were many families with biracial children, often strikingly beautiful, especially when young, with wild blonde curls and deep cupid's-bow lips, a new perfection born from difference. Clearly, in many cases, all around me sex and love were overcoming prejudice. But in other ways, there were still two parallel worlds. I saw how people tended not to see one another. How white people turned to white people to ask for directions, or information, and vice versa. How black people looked surprised to be talked to. As a person and as a novelist, it was impossible not to notice (I think we have come some way since then.) Then I made a friend, Hanna Sakyi, who rapidly became important to me. It began as a convenience relationship, for she started an after-school club at Rosa's school, but I quickly saw how special Hanna was. Rosa loved her at once, and still does. She was Ghanaian, and very black, but then, everything about Hanna was ‘very'. She was very funny, and very sharp, and had a laugh that rolled around a room, and strong self-possession, a sense of herself that made people sit up and take notice; she was very big, and very beautiful, with soulful dark eyes, high cheekbones, dimples, full lips, a short curving upper lip that made her look youthful, and small snowy teeth with a kissing gap. She came to tea, she came to supper. We began talking, and never stopped. At first the one thing we didn't mention was that she was black and I was white. These taboos are strong, and our fears are great. Then one day we started talking about it, and talked about it, for a while, a lot; after which we got over it, mostly
forgot it, and went on with being friends as normal. When Rosa was baptised, aged ten, Hanna was one of her three godmothers, and Nick and I are godparents to her son Robbie. I have other black friends, some of them writers, but Hanna gave me courage to write the book.

I wanted to write about the Britain I loved, my sense of which stretched back to the '50s. It was my parents' country too, the place their generation had fought for in the war, the country my great-uncles had died for. They believed they had risked everything so life would be better, with a new, fairer deal for everyone. The Gees were Labour through and through, and the ideals I grew up with were co-operative, communal, although my father himself, of course, like his father, like so many old Labour patriarchs, was fiercely individualistic and territorial. My father, the bane and the lodestar of my life, who made me a member of the awkward squad, rebelling against him and everything else …

My aim was to write about a racial murder, yet I was being drawn back into confronting my father, without my knowledge, against my will. I started to create a character.

This was Alfred White, the park keeper, who ran his fiefdom for the public good, just as Dad believed in his job as a head teacher. I didn't see Alfred was a version of my father, but looking back, it should have been obvious. Side by side with Alfred was his wife, May White, to whom I gave the name of my mother's mother, who loved reading, as my own mother did, who wrote poems and had a secret life, like her, and whose favourite book was a copy of Tennyson that Mum had been given as a form prize. The actual copy! And she loved and feared Alfred, and hid things from her husband, as
my mother did. And yet, in my head, I wasn't actually writing about my parents, because if I had consciously told myself that, I would have drawn back, afraid. And so, in the shelter of a cloud of unknowing, I began to write my way into the book.

Alfred's park was modelled on beautiful Roundwood Park, my local park, founded in 1900, with its stone sundial and drinking fountain, aviary and flower-beds, its little café, its plane-trees, its roses, its shady lawns where conversation murmured, its gentle hill overlooking the graveyard. But it was also a metaphor for Britain, the country where Stephen Lawrence had been killed. And slowly the book started to come together.

Alfred White had three children (as did my father). Like us, there were two brothers and a sister: Darren, Shirley, and poor little Dirk. Though there the resemblances really did end, for there was not a jot of likeness to my brothers; neither of them is ignorant, a racist, or cheesily in love with America, like Darren, and though I'd love to look sexy and creamy like Shirley—maybe I am sexy and creamy inside?—I am thin and wiry and always in a hurry. Yet in some way that afterwards I couldn't deny, Alfred was my father, and May my mother, and the book was my way of forgiving my father, for in the end Alfred would be tested, and my father was never short of moral courage.

A brief sketch of the plot: there's a row in the park. A black family has walked on the grass, Alfred remonstrates and is accused of racism, becomes enraged and falls down with a stroke. The family gather round his bedside. Rich, shallow Darren, a journalist, comes back from the States to join Shirley and Dirk. Shirley is the widow of a Ghanaian academic, Kojo. Dirk, the youngest and dimmest child, hates black people partly because
he has grown up bathed in his father's mild, old-fashioned racism, but more actively and jealously because his sister married Kojo. Dirk works in the failing local paper-shop, and when an Indian businessman takes it over, his hatred and frustration boil over into murder. And the parents find out. What is to be done?

It was the question the whole country was trying to answer. The police investigation into Stephen Lawrence's death was scandalously poor. Though an inquest would eventually give a verdict of unlawful killing by five named youths, no one was ever convicted or punished. Something had gone terribly wrong in Britain, not just the murder but the way we dealt with it. When the report of the McPherson Inquiry came out, in 1999, the police were found guilty of something new, ‘institutional racism', and everyone was forced to look at themselves and their own institutions, and ask hard questions. We began to see racism everywhere.